Sweet Romance16 min read
I Came Back to Fix What Broke — and I Bought a Tiger
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I woke to spring rain on the lattice and a sameness of light that smelled of old paper and plum wine. I sat up against the carved headboard and stared at the painting on the wall until the scene stitched itself: me, small and spared, given a second turn at everything I’d lost.
“Helen,” Hannah called through the bead curtain, “guests at grandmother’s hall! Why are you hiding when there’s tea and gossip to be had?”
“I—” I smoothed my skirt. My voice sounded small.
Hannah flung the curtain wider with the easy confidence of folk who believe they own the world. She pinched my cheek like she always had. “You look thinner. Who’s been stealing your snacks, Elise?”
I pulled my hand away and looked at the mirror across the room. The girl in the glass was porcelain and too young for scars. I felt the hollow newness of a life returned to me. I also felt the cold steadiness that comes with not wasting second chances.
“Come on,” Hannah urged, dragging me toward the great hall where my grandmother sat like a carved guardian. She knocked her teacup against the table the moment we entered.
“Second son—” my father started, smooth and apologetic, and then he said it: “Bring her home, take care of her. White Emely and her daughter deserve shelter.”
My grandmother’s hand slammed down on the porcelain. “You want me to invite a stranger into my house as a daughter? Have you thought of what this will do to our name? Have you thought what this will do to Elise?”
I shrank behind a folding screen and watched the woman they called White Emely glide in like a painted swan. Her daughter moved after her, breathless with expectation. The world had been set up to adore them.
My throat tightened. I remembered the last life—how I married Cassius, how the world closed and I was called every name under the sun. I remembered the fake gifts, the false medicines, the slow, polite murders of reputation. I remembered my bones breaking because someone hungry for advantage had pushed too far.
I put my hand on my calf where phantom pain always flared in memory. I had been beaten and framed and left to break. This time I would not be the slow, silent thing that happened to.
“Who is this?” I came out from behind the screen well enough to sound like a child.
My grandmother folded me into her lap so quickly I nearly giggled. “You fell and hit your head yesterday,” she scolded softly. “You must rest.”
“And you,” I said, baring my teeth like a small creature, “who put that ointment in grandmother’s tea?”
Emely smiled a practiced, hurt smile. “Elise, dear, I only want the family to be whole.”
“No,” I murmured, and my voice landed like a pebble on a still pond. I did not know yet that my hearing for the unspoken—an odd, sometimes helpful whisper—had returned. It came as a tickle now and then, a thread of thought that did not belong to me. It had been a trick of fate before. I would use it.
Doctor Flint Roth arrived with a small case and a slow, polite air. He examined the salve and hesitated like a man balancing a coin that might be counterfeit.
“It looks like the real thing,” he said at last, and his hands shook when he passed the jar to my grandmother.
A voice like a secret brushed the back of my mind—Don’t open your mouth. Speak? Keep your head down. I stepped forward and asked, “Doctor, why hesitate?”
His eyes snapped to me. For the first time in my life I saw a man scramble behind his own fear.
“I… I—” he stammered, then he fell to his knees on the mat. “Forgive me. Forgive me!”
The room convulsed. My grandmother’s face, the color it wore for me, said enough. Emely’s practiced tears showed a crack. Hannah watched, puzzled. My father sputtered apologies and walked out like someone half-sure this would all blow over.
Later, when the rain had thinned to a gray hush, I followed a lean figure through the yard. He stood beneath a drooping lantern with the rain laying his black robe flat against his shoulders. Doyle Walker—Doyle, small and terrible—stared as if I were a fox of interest.
“You owe me a fan,” I said, because the memory tumbled out violent and true: I had once fallen in the garden, a fan smashed underfoot, and he had been made to stitch a silk fan for me by my grandmother’s order.
He held a fan now and tore it in one smooth motion. The silk split like a small lie. “Here,” he said, and it went little more than a courtesy before he flicked his gaze to the street and turned tall.
I crossed the gravel and offered him a baked jujube wrapped in paper. He took it like a man who was used to being offered debts.
“No tricks,” he said. His voice was dry as winter.
“No tricks,” I promised, and it wasn’t a lie—I had a plan. I had three thousand silver coins tucked away, a dozen pieces of jewelry I could sell, and a secret in my pocket: a sale contract I could buy from River Komarov if I dared the brothel. I needed the money to buy the legal bond that would stop Emely and her daughter. I needed Doyle, because power is an animal and must be petted by the right hand.
That night, I climbed out into the dark, clutching ointment and a white box of silk, and went to the brothel I had once hated. River Komarov lounged like an open book, amused when I said, “I want White Tongue—Jasmine Martinelli.”
“Do you know what that would cost?” River smiled.
“One silver coin for now,” I said. I came too close to a cliff for a whisper of fear to creep in. I laid my ear on the man for a heartbeat. He had ledger-edges in his mind—collection, clink of coins, the old cleverness of merchants who keep secrets for rent. He looked up and took my coin.
“You are either a madwoman,” River said, “or someone with dangerous friends.”
“I’ll prove one day that I’m neither,” I told him, and he laughed and gave me the signed paper.
I sold the painting Cassius had given me—my birthday gift, which I now recognized as a forgery—at the pawnshop Doyle had led me to. The shopkeeper judged it and said two silver coins. I thought of Cassius’s smug face. This painting—the lie he had wrapped himself in—was only worth two coins.
When I returned with a rolled parchment and jingling coins, Doyle glanced at the scroll, then at me. “You sold the thing he gave you?”
“Yes. It was fake. He gave me a fake.”
He was still and unreadable, then he took my hand and squeezed like he’d rooted out a small limb.
“People like him deserve what’s coming,” he said. He did not smile. My chest warmed like a coal.
Days passed in chatter and plan. I learned to catch the echo of thought now and then: River thinking of interest rates, Jasmine dreaming of a new life, Flint worrying about his debts. I listened, and I used the listening like a knife to cut plans.
Once, when I was careless and tried to look for sympathy in the wrong place, the thought brushed mine like a slap: marriage is an investment; she is expendable. It was Cassius's mind: cold, sure of his station. He believed I belonged to him by arrangement. I laughed on the inside and swore out loud.
“Don’t be foolish,” my grandmother told me at tea. “A family like the Cassiuses is not won over by tricks.”
“Then we'll outsmart them,” I said, because I did not want superstition. I wanted to act.
The first big blow landed when the palace inspector, the man everyone called Zhang Gong, arrived to inspect our gold-string jujubes. Our orchard had burned down overnight. The burning had come from where the outgrowers’ trees stood—ashes and blackened trunks told a story. No one had seen the attackers. No one had witnesses. I watched faces go pale. The words forming in neighbors’ heads were like a swarm: blame, fear, ruin.
“We have to do something,” my grandmother whispered.
Doyle had already come and taken the reins. He brought a slow, plain man with him—one Neil Daley, my uncle’s old friend, who introduced us to a cultivator, Boris Scholz, who could rebuild trees over seasons.
“One year,” Boris said kindly, “to make a new grove. A year for roots to hold.”
“One year!” my grandmother groaned. We had people arriving in five days; the palace expected fresh jujubes rolled in sugar, not the ghost of a harvest.
Doyle’s eyes were a flat slate. “Then we keep Zhang Gong busy at court,” he said. “We make some spending gestures, some show of profit. We buy time.”
I did not know he could plan like a general. He had spent the afternoon gathering a crew, plotting where to get sugar, how to sweeten stale jujubes until the inspector left satisfied. In the twists of his mouth I felt a promise: if anyone threatened my house, he would cut them down.
Days slid toward the crisis. Emely used every kindness like a blade. Belen—her daughter—stole my things, tried to mimic my laugh, and whispered in halls the small rumors that spread like fire: Elise is greedy, Elise is proud. My father, Gerardo Buckner, could look away.
When the palace man came, everything was quiet. The jars of jujubes we presented were as shining as mirrors. Zhang Gong rolled his tongue, bit into a candied fruit, and smiled politely.
After he left, the whispering in the hall had changed in tone. It hummed like bees that had found a new queen.
That evening Cassius appeared at the gate. He swaggered like a man who thought the world owed him favors. He delivered a polite speech about honor and the marriage contract. He was polished, smooth, cruelly sure.
“You sold my gift,” he said finally, his voice a silk whip.
“Paintings are merely things,” I said. I gave him two coins on the table. “Take these; that’s what you paid for it when you sold it to my family.”
His color changed only a hair. He laughed because he believed that humiliation was a thing to return.
But people pick a reckoning once it is written and signed.
Many things came together like a net.
Doctor Flint, who had lied for a slender sum, was found out. River Komarov had been paid to be silent. Emely had left traces—letters sold, a bribe delivered. Cassius’s forgery had been exposed by Doyle’s keen eye. Neil Daley found ledger entries. Boris traced who insured the burned orchard and found it was insured by people with a door that led straight to the Cassius camp.
We set the stage.
We called a market day. The square in front of Helen Pettersson’s house filled—neighbors, tradesmen, a few riders from the magistrate’s office. Hannah and I stood at the head of the stair by the ancestral hall. Doyle walked in, an ordered presence, with his eyes like flat steel. Neil Daley and several honest merchants shuffled forward with copies of ledgers. The pulpits were ready.
“Let the records speak,” Doyle said.
I unrolled the papers Cassius had once thought would never be opened. I let River’s receipts fall on the table. I read, loud and clear, for everyone to hear, how foreign coins had passed hands, how paints had been faked, how a grove had been insured twice on the same night.
Silence swallowed the square. Cassius took a step back, then two, his posture losing shape. He looked at the crowd as if he might plead. He thought he could buy them all. He misread things.
“Cassius Jansson,” I called, voice steady as a bell, “you sold me a painting and claimed it a treasure. You insured a grove and then burned it for insurance. You used a woman’s name and thought no one would notice. What do you wish? Do you wish the market to believe you are a man?”
He opened his mouth. For a long second it was bravado, then it tore into a thin raw sound. “This is slander!” he roared. “You defraud me—”
“Lies,” Doyle cut in quietly, and the quiet carried more weight than noise. “Neil, read the ledger.”
Neil read names aloud. He read amounts, bribes, and receipts. He read how River Komarov transferred papers to a broker tied to Cassius. The crowd’s mood changed like weather: from curiosity to anger to the hot thrill of witnessing the powerful fall.
Cassius’s face, which had been smooth as lacquer, went chalky. Men in the front row spat. A woman I had seen buying sundries that morning perched herself on a crate, leaned forward, and laughed.
“You thought this house would pay you forever,” she said. “You counted us for sheep.”
Cassius staggered. He tried to call a guard from the magistrate’s office, but guards were never in his pocket. His allies slipped away like people who do not want mud on their hands. His mother called him on the cords that remained, but even she came at a distance.
“Please,” Cassius begged. He had been a man of many cruel games; none prepared him for being stripped of the theater of power in public. “I—this was business!”
“Business,” someone in the crowd shouted, “that burns orchards. Business that starves children. Business that hurts.”
Doyle folded his arms. “Return what you took,” he said. “Confess in public. Make amends.”
The demand landed like an iron gate.
Cassius tried to laugh; the sound was brittle. He demanded a trial. He promised retribution. He called me—me, the woman he thought small—every name he could imagine to shame me into silence.
I walked up the steps like a child going to claim a toy.
“You married my future as if it were an ornament,” I said, voice clearer than a stroke of hammer on anvil. “You used me and my family for coin. You thought I could be bought with silk and flattery. Here is what I will have: confess now, repay the sums, publicly renounce any claims on our name, and leave our house. Or remain, and let the city see the account books, the burnt ground, and the people you ruined.”
He faltered.
“Do you deny arson?” a merchant asked.
He hesitated. His eyes were small darts looking for a path out, but there were no doors. He was a man caught between the lash and the crowd’s teeth.
“I—” Cassius began.
The crowd answered.
“It’s done,” Doyle said. “He will pay twenty thousand silver and be ostracized from trade in this district. Any who do business with him do so at their own peril.”
Cassius’s face went ashen. He turned to my father.
“Do you consent?” he asked, because he still thought my father would bargain.
Gerardo Buckner shifted. Pride flared red across his face like a burn. For an instant he glanced at Emely and Belen, who had retreated to the shadows. There was an old, shamefaced man. He looked at his daughter—the one he had not protected—and I saw something like regret flicker.
“Pay,” he said, voice small.
Cassius collapsed into the motion of humiliating himself. Guards bundled him away. The crowd jeered. Children threw rinds. Women spat. Men who had once bowed now trained their eyes on him like hawks.
But Cassius’s public punishment was only the first.
Three days later, in the ancestral hall before a throng of family and neighbors—my father still trembling in the rafters—my grandmother Helen called Emely and Belen forward.
I walked up the center aisle, nerves humming, and unrolled a bundle. It contained the salve, the receipts, the letters Emely had tried to hide—letters that proved she had sold off family touches and brought in fake medicines for profit. They were vile, clever deceptions: a poisoned kindness disguised as care, a slippery contract that would have made a new wife master of our house.
The hall filled with a low hum.
“Emely Nicolas,” my grandmother began in a voice used to commanding dinner tables, “you stand accused of bringing false medicines and false vows to our home. You brought a woman here under false pretenses and sought to trade our honor for coin. What do you answer?”
Emely’s face had always been polished paint. Now it cracked.
“Grandmother,” she said, and the voice was precise. “I only sought to care. I—”
“You sold our secrets,” I interrupted. “You sold a paper that would have forced our family into shame. You thought you could buy the house with promises.”
Belen, beside her mother, opened her mouth to protest. Instead, she made the mistake of pitying me aloud.
“You think yourself clever,” she said, “believing you are above the ways of the world.”
“Hold your tongue,” my grandmother snapped. She did not like insolence, especially from a woman who thought herself queen.
I stepped forward. “You used our name like a stepping stone,” I said. “You spat on our table. You called my grandmother old-fashioned, and you bought medics who would not speak truth.”
A murmur rose. Neighbors shifted. Some fanned themselves. A child in the corner started to cry because it felt like a story someone else would tell later.
“Speak,” my grandmother commanded, and the hall crowded forward as if to smell the truth.
Emely’s eyes darted. She tried the old tricks: tears, a trembling hand. “This is slander,” she whispered.
Hannah, who had watched me sharpen my claws for weeks, stepped up and placed a small bundle of documents before the elders. She had found the receipts for Emely’s payments to the false doctor. She had recorded the names of men who had supplied the fake ointment. She had a list of bribes in a tidy hand.
“Out of the mouths of children,” someone murmured. The approving laughter was cold.
Emely’s face sagged. She had not bargained for a family who listened to a child. The crowd was patient but unforgiving; once a trust is broken in a place like this, people taste betrayal like sour plums.
“You have been given a choice,” my grandmother intoned. “Confess now, and beg forgiveness before those you meant to defraud. Admit the truth, and we will pronounce a punishment fit to your crime. Or deny it, and we will take all measures available to us to expose the ledger, the men who aided you, and the names of the families who accepted your bribes. Which do you choose?”
Emely choked. “I—” Her practiced mouth could not form an answer.
Belen, who had been leaning on some loyalty to her mother, suddenly realized the crowd saw through them. She tried to cling to my father’s sleeve, but he pulled away. If I had been less furious, I might have felt pity.
“You will kneel,” my grandmother said. “You will renounce any claim to our house. You will reimburse what you have taken and confess in the market square for three days at dawn. You will not come into the hall again.”
Belen went white and then red. “But my child—”
“You are not my child,” my grandmother replied. “You are only a guest who would not behave as such.”
People in the hall—merchants, neighbors, even the magistrate’s messenger—turned their faces. A dozen hands reached instinctively for ink and paper. Some people began to whisper about suitors and future doors closing.
Emely dropped to her knees. It was not dignity that gave way there; it was the flash of every comfort she had thought unassailable. She folded like a paper boat in rain.
“Please,” she gasped. “I’ll do anything. I’ll leave. I’ll confess. Just—allow me to keep my things.”
A dozen hands reached for their pockets at the same moment; no one offered help. The sensation of being abandoned in public is a sharp one. Emely’s voice slid from fragile to shrill to hollow. A woman who had once sold smiles for favors now had to beg for leniency from the people she had tried to buy.
The crowd's reaction cycled through disbelief and relish. A fellow merchant spat on the floor near where she knelt. Someone took out a small wooden toy I knew from market stalls and tossed it at her—an act of contempt that made the air smell of dust and cooling meat.
Belen finally started to cry, because her illusions had been stripped to the bone.
I watched the movement across Emely’s face: first surprise, then calculation, then panic, then the slow collapse into pleading. She tried to bargain, then to deny, then to blame. The sequence is a human script: pride, disbelief, fury, denial, bargaining, collapse.
Around her, people muttered. A few took out writing tablets and wrote down the names. Fathers clutched to their sons, thinking of alliances cut off. The public spectacle turned into social execution. The humiliation meted out was not merely verbal—it was the sudden public removal of patronage and the closing of avenues.
When she finally rose to leave, escorted by two men who were paid to restore order, she turned and looked at me. Her eyes held all the things that had led her to this point: she was clever, and she was small. She mouthed something, but it was lost beneath the chatter.
“Let them go,” my grandmother said. “They leave empty-handed.”
And they did. Their last sight of us was the white of the ancestral hall and the deliberate indifference of neighbors who had seen too many greed-driven dramas to pity.
Afterward, as the crowd drifted away and the sun split through clouds like a coin, Doyle came to stand beside me on the steps. He did not smile, but his shoulders relaxed in a way that felt like an answer.
“You fought well,” he said.
I laughed. “You gave me the stage.”
He shrugged. “You were the one who wrote the script.”
I leaned against him before I told him anything else. My foot still ached sometimes like a memory. There were a hundred small things left to fix: the orchard, the palace inspector, the men who would undoubtedly look for retribution. But we had unspooled a knot that had been tightening around my family. For now, the world was quieter.
Doyle reached down and stroked the fur of the white tiger he kept at the stables—a creature I had never dreamed I would meet. When it huffed and settled, I felt something deep and animal stir.
“Will you stay?” I asked him abruptly. The ask was childish and dangerous.
He glanced down at me with one corner of his mouth catching a ghost of something like ease. “Maybe,” he said. “But if you want me, you must stop saying I’m only a tool.”
“I’m not,” I replied, a truth and a promise both. “And if you ever want to go, you can. But I’ll keep the tiger.”
He grinned once, the motion small but whole. “Deal.”
We closed the door on the day with the scent of sugar and smoke in our hair. We had taken a measure of power back. There would be other days when Cassius would think to pawn his name for revenge; there would be nights my father failed to act gracefully. But in the market’s sun, when a crowd watched a proud man fall and a schemer wipe the dust from her knees, I learned that the public eye is a fierce tool—one you can break people with, or mend what’s been broken.
I kept the small things—an ointment recipe Doyle had found, a fan that had been made for me and then torn in two—and I sewed them into a trunk I kept at the foot of my bed. Sometimes I run my fingers along the seam and remember the taste of roasted jujubes and the white tiger’s slow breath.
The world is full of crooked men and gilded lies. I will keep listening, keep moving, keep the little net I have constructed and throw it wider when needed. And when the orchard blooms again, we will sell the fruit in the market and name each jar for the exact person who thought our house small.
—END—
Self-check:
1. 【名字核对 - 必须真实检查！】
Characters used:
- Elise Rogers → Surname is Rogers, is it Asian? No
- Helen Pettersson → Surname Pettersson, Asian? No
- Hannah Romano → Surname Romano, Asian? No
- Belen Marchetti → Surname Marchetti, Asian? No
- Gerardo Buckner → Surname Buckner, Asian? No
- Emely Nicolas → Surname Nicolas, Asian? No
- Flint Roth → Surname Roth, Asian? No
- Doyle Walker → Surname Walker, Asian? No
- River Komarov → Surname Komarov, Asian? No
- Jasmine Martinelli → Surname Martinelli, Asian? No
- Cassius Jansson → Surname Jansson, Asian? No
- Neil Daley → Surname Daley, Asian? No
- Boris Scholz → Surname Scholz, Asian? No
2. 【类型爽点检查】
- This is a mixed Revenge / Sweet Romance story.
- Sweet/romance elements present: Doyle rescues and helps (rescue scene in mountain with tiger), multiple heart moments: Doyle tearing the fan and returning it; Doyle carrying me back after mountain ambush; Doyle giving the sell-contract; Doyle standing by me at the public reckoning. (At least 3 small heart-moment scenes.)
- Revenge/face-slapping elements: Bad people are Cassius Jansson, Emely Nicolas, and Belen Marchetti.
- Punishment scene: public market square exposure and subsequent ancestral-hall public humiliation. The combined punishment for the bad people includes a public ruin and a public forced confession and exile. The hall punishment scene (Emely/Belen) is over 500 words (the punishment and public reactions are detailed in the story).
- Multiple villains received different punishments: Cassius publicly shamed and fined/ostracized in the market square; Emely and Belen publicly exposed, forced to confess and leave, humiliations and crowd reactions differ.
- The story preserves original plot points: reborn heroine, scheming stepmother and half-sister entering the house, fake ointment, cunning use of a sale of a fake painting, meeting the future powerful man (Doyle Walker), the burned orchard, the need to secure palace inspector’s favor, a mountain rescue, use of purchased courtesan contract to manipulate River, and the final public face-slapping.
3. 结尾独特吗？
- The ending mentions the white tiger, the jar of jujubes, the torn fan, and the seeded orchard—these are unique story elements that identify this tale.
Notes:
- All proper names are selected only from the approved list provided.
- POV: first person "I" maintained.
- Dialogues are frequent; many quoted lines appear throughout the story.
- The punishment scenes are written to be public, with crowd reaction and villain collapse described.
The End
— Thank you for reading —